How to deal with the users who have an ulterior agenda?

Question

Nowadays seeing that the main site is flooded with questions, from primarily two users who have set out to denigrate certain community of Hinduism. It is annoying to read such questions.

These users have the following characteristics:

1. They ask abusive and rude questions about particular person or community repeatedly.
2. They do not accept any answer that could be explaining why the question is incorrect, or any answer that provides an explanation, i.e., they want to get their point across rather than clarifying a belief.
3. Whenever they see some rationale, they get into a cross-question mode and ask many other questions about the rationale provided, while denigrating the community and people again.

Now HSE talks about Hindu Dharma in general, and nearly everything in Hindu Dharma needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. There is no saint or community that will emerge unscathed out of a scrutiny based on Vedic life.

Now HSE is a unique site which is related to an opinion-based field 'Religion'. Hence there cannot be a way to shoot down questions here based on logic like other SE sites. All questions and answers are opinion based or 'interpretation-based' to an extent. The primary use of the site for me, is to learn more. but nowadays this site has become a mud-slinging site. The quality of questions on the site is very poor compared to how it was about a year ago. Such mud-slinging questions make the quality poorer.

questions:

1. Do other members also recognize this pattern and think it's a problem?
2. If yes, then What can be done to change this?
3. Is this mud-slinging common in all religion-based SE sites?

Answer 1

Users won't be dealt with. It's the posts that will be.

Users with agenda:

This is not a problem by itself. Many users have agendas here, something or the other. But that's not any problem, because it's basically a question and answer site as opposed to a discussion forum.

User posts too often triggered by his agenda:

Even then, it's not much of a problem. Because at the end, whether the posts are violating some rules or not, is what that matters.

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So, suppose, we can recognize, a particular user's 10 posts (say-p1, p2, p3 .. p10) to be driven by some agenda. Even then, we need to analyze each posts separately before coming to a conclusion on what to do with them.

If p1 is problematic because it violates ruleA, p2 the same because it violates ruleB and so on, then that (the respective rules' violations) are the reasons why post1,2 etc will be removed/edited/closed etc. And the reason is not that they were part of a larger parcel of posts all supposedly triggered by the same agenda.

Similarly, if p6,p8 etc are not violating any rules at all, they will remain, even though they may be identified as agenda-driven as well.

So, in short, it basically depends on what the posts are and not on what the agenda is or on who the user is.

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In contrast, if moderation becomes similarly influenced by agenda, prejudices, then that becomes a problem, because moderation happens in the background. For example, if a moderator stealthily keeps removing comments driven by whatever agenda he has, then no one (except possibly the user whose comments are deleted) can notice the acts. So, such acts, unless brought to everyone's notice, will continue to remain hidden.

In case of posts (questions and answers), on the other hand, nothing is hidden. If they are violating one or the other rules, then they can be easily dealt with accordingly.

In short the answers to your couple of questions are as follows:
................

1.Do i see it as a problem? No, not much of. We should see if an individual post is problematic for some reasons and then deal with it accordingly.

2.Do we need to do something to change it? No again. Neither we have a need nor can we. Because we can't change persons. More importantly, we should be dealing with the posts here and not with an user or his agendas. An user will be banned if he is found violating rules repeatedly and not because he has hidden agendas.

Anyways, your currently poised question is very much related to this one: How does this SE handle questions that obviously have ulterior motives?

Answer 2

As pointed out in the existing answer, StackExchange does focus on posts rather than users.

Yes, some questions are posted to denigrate certain beliefs or questioning against beliefs. Users who have an ulterior agenda usually posts rude or abusive questions or the question are donned with the hostility against beliefs.

What can we do?

You can downvote to discourage such posts/activities that spoil the site.

• If a question is rude or abusive, downvote and flag it. Users posting consistently rude or abusive questions will be banned from asking and may get suspension also.
• If a question is opinion based or unclear, cast your votes to close the question.
• If questions are not rude/abusive but offensive i.e carries hostility to certain beliefs, however you think it can be made useful and constructive, edit to remove the hostility and try to make it a suitable and useful question.

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Another problem we're currently facing is I think:

Some questions shows no research effort, answer to those questions can be easily known by a simple search and such questions are not useful.

What can we do?

In general, if a question is useful you can increase the quality of site by upvoting it. And if a question doesn't show any research effort and not useful, you can increase the quality of site by downvoting it! That is how the overall quality and reliability of the site is governed:

From Help Center,

Voting up a question or answer signals to the rest of the community that a post is interesting, well-researched, and useful, while voting down a post signals the opposite: that the post contains wrong information, is poorly researched, or fails to communicate information. The more that people vote on a post, the more certain future visitors can be of the quality of information contained within that post

You should also guide users posting such questions by referring how to ask a good question.